I have been spending lots of time thinking about this myself, and am planing
to use several, if not all, of the custom screens to store this kind of
donor research. From my visits with other organizations, it seems evident
that information must be organized in a way that is pertinent to the
organizations fundraising goals. For instance, an environmental
organization may want to create individual fields for how much their members
are giving to other specified environmental organizations. Their givers
may, however, also give to arts organizations and their alma mater. This
information may not be as important (read: they will never do a search based
on that information, but it is still good to know it in making a decision
about how much to ask for), so it could be stored in a larger text box that
could be a cumulative comments box.
An organization that is planning a specific campaign, such as a capital
campaign, may wish to start a field that stores information about how much
their donors have given to other like campaigns.
A drop box may be employed to keep information about donors' income range or
household value. That way it is easy to search a segment of your donors.
It is all a matter of how searchable you want certain information to be.
The more research an organization begins to do on its donors, the more it
will realize that their is so much it will want to store (bio, jobs, family,
interests), and since there is limited space available to store it, the
organization needs to be certain to make some data more searchable (and take
up more room in a screen layout) and some less searchable. For most of us,
I imagine the custom screens will provide enough space to organize this
information.
I hope this is helpful in beginning to think about how to store donor
information.
Daniel Kos
> Yes. Good point! Please include me in any corresponsence on this issue.
> -otis
>
> Anna Clarke wrote:
>
>> We are planning our conversion from our homegrown filemaker database to
>> ebase. What a relief! One of the pieces of information that interests us
>> about our donors is how much money they have given to other organizations.
>> So if we notice that someone who has had a senior membership with us for ten
>> years gave some-one else $5000 we like to know that so we can meet with them
>> and ask them for a check, and then slap ourselves for not asking earlier.
>> It's unclear to me how best to track this "capacity to donate" in ebase. If
>> anyone is tracking this I would be interested in hearing how you do it.
>
> ________________________
>
> Michael "Otis" Lavitschke
> Member Services Manager
>
> River Alliance of Wisconsin
> 306 E. Wilson St., Suite 2W
> Madison, WI 53703
>
> 608-441-8414
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> www.wisconsinrivers.org
> ________________________
>
>
>
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